Only two English girls have married either an heir presumptive or an heir apparent to the English throne in the last 500 years or so — and neither went on to be queen.

One was Lady Diana Spencer when she married Prince Charles in 1981, and the other was Anne Hyde (below), who married the exiled future James II in a secret ceremony in Holland in 1659 — and then went through an official ceremony in London in 1660 after the restoration of James’s brother Charles II. That situation is unlikely to change even after Kate Middleton marries Prince William, since he is not now the direct heir to the throne.

But Anne Hyde (1637-1671) remains the only daughter of an English commoner to marry such an heir since the Middle Ages. She married James Duke of York on September 3, 1660, when her father — created Baron Hyde in November that year and Earl of Clarendon in April 1661 — was still Sir Edward Hyde.

Clarendon, of course, went on to become Chancellor of Oxford University and indeed Lord Chancellor of England. He moved into Cornbury Park, Charlbury, in 1661. He gave the proceeds of his best-selling account of the English Civil War, History of the Rebellion, to the university. The profits from the book eventually paid for much of the cost of the Clarendon Building in Broad Street, designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor, and the headquarters of Oxford University Press between 1713 and 1830.

Poor Anne Hyde, a maid of honour to James’s sister Mary of Orange, she was described as plain and fat by diarist Samuel Pepys, who also remarked that “the Duke of York, in all things but in his codpiece, is led by the nose by his wife”.

When she married James (1633-1701) in London she was already seven months pregnant with her first child, Charles, who was to die in infancy. She went on to have seven more children but only two, the future queens Mary and Anne, survived. She herself died before she could succeed as Queen Consort to James — who was, in any case, ousted as king in the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

After her death, James married the Italian princess Mary of Modena (1658-1718). Nathaniel Crew, Bishop of Oxford, performed a brief Church of England marriage service in Dover when she first arrived in England in order to recognise the earlier Catholic marriage. Only one of her many children, the so-called Old Pretender, James Edward, survived her.

Page of Honour at the coronation of James II was Edward, Viscount Cornbury, Clarendon’s grandson and Anne Hyde’s nephew, who caused such a scandal as Governor of New York and New Jersey from 1701 to 1708 that James’s daughter Queen Anne had to remove him. He was reputedly a receiver of bribes and, more ridiculously, a cross-dresser who, dressed in women’s clothes, “lurked behind trees to pounce, shrieking with laughter on his victims”. A portrait of someone dressed in women’s clothing at the New York Historical Society has long been supposed to be of him. However, 12 years ago Patricia Bonomi, emeritus professor of history at New York University, went some way to debunk the stories — widely accepted as true in the USA — pointing out that the tales of transvestism caused little tittle-tattle in UK. She thought that was surprising, “especially considering what a morsel the transvestism of the Queen’s near relation should have been in a gossip-loving society”.

As for other non-royal women who married into the royal family, only one became queen: Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, later Queen Consort to George VI and then the Queen Mother (1900-2002). She married Albert Duke of York in 1923, but he was not then heir to the throne. And his brother, Edward VIII, had already been king and abdicated by the time he got married to the American Wallace Simpson in 1936.